Hitching
by writerchickgirl
Summary: Stuck in the afterlife, Kate finds herself continuing to watch over her former coworkers, using an unusual ability she refers to as hitching. No romance. Kinda Tony-centric


**A/N: M'kay, so as I'm sure any of my other readers have noticed. I don't tend to finish longer stories. I'm bad about that. And I've only even started two! It's rather pathetic. Anywho, Imma try a oneshot out for size. My very first NCIS fic. This idea just popped into my brain and festered until I eventually typed it up (no, this is not what I believe the afterlife to be like. I'm not claiming that this is what it is; I made it like this purely for the sake of the story). It's unrevised so any _helpful critique_ (not pointless flaming, though I guess you can if you really want to) would be much appreciated. As my friend Sarah once said, "I'm not looking for a pessimist, nor am I looking for an optimist. I'm looking for an _editor._" Read and enjoy!**

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**And review. That too. **

Kate was a Catholic. She'd believed in God, and in Heaven. She had gone to a Catholic school, and had been subsequently teased about its uniform; but she had been a believer. Sure, there had been times when she had wondered if the afterlife was indeed as she thought it would be, or if it was something else.

Still, she had never once dreamed that it would be this _boring_.

Rules in the afterlife were strict: she could not set foot anywhere she had never been while she lived. She could not see any other "ghosts", so she wasn't entirely sure if everyone went through the same things she did when they died, or if she was just a special case who missed out on the real thing. She could touch nothing, not even the ground (floating _was_ a useful skill, she mused), she could not sleep, she could not communicate with anyone, and all in all, life after death was simply dull.

At first, after waiting in the bullpen until news of Ari's death, she had floated all the way home. By home, she meant back to her parents' house. She wanted to know that they were okay without her. Honestly, when she finally arrived, watching her parents cry over her death while she could only stand by helplessly, it was beyond lonely, and beyond depressing.

So, eventually, she left. Retraced her steps all the way back to Washington, D.C., to her old apartment. Another person lived there now, a florist, and pretty blonde woman with no idea of the fate of the apartment's previous owner. Kate had to mentally berate herself for thinking how Tony was likely to get in bed with her; she was dead now, couldn't she get a break from his womanizing-ness (if that was even a word)?

Then she felt guilty for thinking that about him, after having gone and _died_ on him and everyone else, and resolved never to think like that about her former partner again.

Maybe it was because of this resolve, this new idealism, that she was the only one on the team (at least, she still considered herself a part of the team) that realized how _stupidly_ they were acting.

Let me go back a little bit. Soon after coming back to D.C., Kate found herself following the same routine she had for two years to the best of her (dead) ability. However, when she first walked into the bullpen, it seemed that Ziva was the new Kate, Gibbs had vanished, and Tony, _Tony_ of all people, was the new Gibbs.

It was at this moment when she first discovered hitching.

It seemed that the afterlife wasn't _totally _without any sort of human contact. She had actually found out purely by accident, floating above her chair out of habit and not a little bit of nostalgia, when, all of a sudden, the Israeli who had assisted in the victory over Ari, sat down right on top of her.

And, without any explanation, she was in her mind.

For a moment, Kate couldn't even begin to process what was happening. A confusing stream of words in a language she did not know and yet somehow understood appeared in her mind. Slowly, she began to comprehend what was happening.

From Ziva's mind, she quickly discovered the nature of Gibbs departure, and all the catastrophic events leading up to it, as well as the shared resentment her... _host_ and McGee now felt towards the new team leader.

And she grew angry.

It was almost funny, how unfamiliar she had become with the feeling of rage, so much that it almost took her aback, were it not for the fact that she was so, well, angry. Nothing and no one had been able to make her angry for a long time, isolated as death had made her. But her sojourn into Ziva's mind and the truth of all that had happened as she had been visiting her parents disgusted her.

Ziva was making a bad first impression.

None of it had been Tony's fault. Even as distorted as the memories were, coming from Ziva's perspective, it was obvious to Kate that Tony was just as distressed about the whole mess as everyone else, and no one was bothering to stop and ask him how he felt about just all of a sudden being thrust into his new position. It seemed all anyone could do was complain and jibe about how much he was _not_ Gibbs, as though he didn't understand that. Whenever he did something different, they complained that he had changed things up. When he tried to do something like Gibbs, they complained he was trying to be Gibbs. Even Abby and Ducky couldn't seem to understand it; Abby kept crying over Gibbs and staring at her pictures of him and Ducky kept ranting about him too much to actually listen.

Thank _God_ for Palmer.

If someone had asked Kate while she was alive who Tony would've turned to at a time like this, Jimmy Palmer wouldn't have made it into her top ten. Nonetheless, if it weren't for the autopsy gremlin, Kate wasn't entirely certain that Tony could've held it together through all shit he was going through.

Death certainly changes your perspective, doesn't it?

Soon enough, she found herself moving with Ziva as she stood up and began walking to the elevator. Panic began to seep in that she might always be stuck in Ziva's mind, but as soon as she tried to move, she simply phased out of Ziva's body and back into the hallway.

She discovered some of the finer points of hitching soon enough: She could only hitch if she was in full contact with said person, as in her entire spirit in the same spot as the person. She could move straight out of a hitching by simply trying to move on her own. However, if she stayed in a hitch, she could go wherever that person went. Of course, she didn't de-hitch if it was somewhere she had never been, not wanting to risk getting stuck there. She had no clue what would happen if she was hitching someone as they died. Would she die again?

But other than that, it was a free ride into someone's mind.

At first, she felt obliged to her morality to leave a person's mind private. Instead, she simply hitched to crime scenes and such, for a little entertainment, in a morbid kind of way. She watched from the sidelines, watching Gibbs come back, anger bubbling at his callous, disinterested attitude towards Tony for no good reason. If she could have, she would've slapped him.

But she couldn't. So she just watched, and simmered.

When Tony's car was blown up, she felt the same amount of despair as the others. She'd been meandering around the bullpen, watching Gibbs and McGee working desperately to figure out something she had already learned from the Director and Tony. After Ziva had come in and practically interrogated Gibbs and McGee, and Jenny had _finally_ come clean about the undercover operation that she and Tony had been running for months, they had been waiting in MTAC, watching his car through the traffic surveillance.

And then it blew up in their faces.

Literally.

She started freaking out, wondering if she would be able to find Tony if he _was_, in fact, blown up. Then she remembered that she couldn't see anyone else who had died, and therefore mostly likely wouldn't be able to see Tony. Therefore, she was just as clueless as the rest of them as to whether or not Tony was the charred body sitting down in autopsy. What made it even worse was, being as isolated as she was, with no comforting words from any friends, any hope she had quickly dissipated. How could he be alive? She could come up with nothing conceivable short of something straight out of one of his James Bond movies.

The waiting was torture, for her more than anyone else. She already knew what the afterlife was like, and it definitely was no bowl of roses. As much as she had complained about her partner in life, she didn't want him sentenced to this, not before he was an old man, not now, not like her.

When Ducky came up with the news of Tony's survival, Kate had never been more relieved.

Except, maybe, for when he walked through the door.

Man, if he could hear her now, Tony wouldn't let her hear the end of it.

After that, things slowed down. She tried to keep up the ethics she had before, but after a while, lines between what was morally right and morally wrong became blurred. She began to allow herself to see into her former coworkers' minds, all their pain and despair and weakness. She did it to each one of them, when the loneliness became too much for her to handle. She learned to immerse herself in her friends' pasts, all their secrets and misgiving, things they would never have wanted her to see.

Except for Tony.

For whatever reason, she couldn't bring herself to hitch onto Tony's mind, aside from the harmless type where she was simply along for the ride, seeing what he saw, and hearing only his thoughts at that moment in time. Although at first she told herself that she didn't want to watch a child get so incredibly spoiled as Tony was sure to have been, she later began to wonder if, maybe, it was because she had heard these little snippets that she avoided it so venomously.

She'd had the bad luck to have been hitching Tony when Jenny was shot. And hearing all the thoughts that were going through his head scared her so much, she couldn't even bring herself to un-hitch for an entire week. Thinking his awful, self-recriminating thoughts, feeling his pain at her death, all of it, was horrifying, to say the least. But on the outside he was still Tony.

Which was what really scared her.

Now she was continually wondering whether Tony wore this mask when _she_, herself, was alive. Judging by how easily he had slipped into it, she would bet he'd been doing it _long_ before he'd ever met her. Maybe even before he met Gibbs.

And that was a long time ago.

So, to be honest, she wasn't sure she wanted to know. Even Gibbs's and Ziva's pasts, while with their own little horror stories, were awful, it was just... different with Tony. The relationship was different. She had a picture in her head of the prankster frat boy he should be, and she didn't want that to change. She didn't want to see him any different. She didn't...

She didn't want to admit that she had been wrong.

_Well_, she thought sardonically, _looks like even when I'm dead I can't handle being wrong_. _Isn't that pathetic._

Eventually, she supposed, curiosity would win out over her better judgment. Someday, when Tony was (hopefully) old and gray, she would most likely make that journey into his memories that she had avoided for these past few years. But for right now, she was content to wait, and see where life and death took them all.

**A/N: Sooo... likey-likey? Lemme know real soon!**


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